Monday, November 16, 2009

CUPE Wants Your Last Cappuccino

For years, CUPE and Vancouver City managers at Carnegie Centre have functioned in synch, like one giant Leona Helmsley inflicting cruelty on "the little people". Now it looks as though Leona's got an auto-immune disorder.

Paul Faoro, head of CUPE Local 15 which represents inside City workers, was on CKNW radio yesterday accusing the City of being "over-managed". He wants to see the City cut the jobs of managers, not just unionized workers. Faoro was responding to what he called, "the $60 million question": Who will lose their jobs as the City faces a $60 million budget shortfall and Council is determined to avoid serious residential tax hikes. So far, all of the jobs Faoro has seen slated to be cut are those of unionized workers. Yet there is one manager for every nine unionized workers, he says. Faoro believes that the City intentionally hires excess managers, so that they can do the work when CUPE strikes.

I agree with Faoro. I've repeatedly stated on this blog that Carnegie Centre is grossly over-managed. When managers have time to roll back the right of a homeless man to sit as an elected official, or the right of a woman to ask a male supervisor his name when he has made a decision to ban her from the building for raising the issue of sexism, their ample idle time has become the devil's playground. Either Ethel Whitty or Dan Tetrault should go.

Behead Leona.

That's Faoro's second choice though. First, he is eying the little people who pay taxes. He wants them to swallow a residential tax hike of 5%. He argues that a study has shown that Vancouver residents want to keep services such as libraries and community centres, and are willing to pay for them. Unlike Faoro, I don't see it as either/or. Tax hikes aren't necessary to maintain City services at current levels, if the fat, the morbid obesity, is trimmed. Either Whitty or Tetrault, for starters.

Faoro argued that a 5% property tax hike would be $50 a year. He said it merely amounts to "a few less cappuccinos". That's one way of describing it. I've heard it described other ways. Death by a thousand cuts. Incrimentalism.

Attempting to create common ground with the radio audience, Faoro noted that he too is a homeowner, that if there were a 5% residential tax hike, he too would feel it. He doesn't mention that it would feel good at his house: with the union dues flowing, he would get his usual raise, his usual hike in take-home pay. He could buy a round of cappuccinos at Waves coffee shop on Pender St., where CUPE members from Carnegie grab them between human rights abuses.

I almost got taken in during Faoro's bonding moment, but I know too much. I covered the story of the non-union secretaries hired by CUPE Local 116 to staff their executive offices. I learned how those secretaries had been fired, one after the other for daring to speak up about the fact that they were being run into the ground with overwork. One took CUPE to court when they allegedly reneged on promise to give her a pension. When the only one who hadn't been fired spoke up in support of the others, CUPE arranged for police officers who didn't even have jurisdiction at Local 116 to do them a favour. That favour was to visit the secretary at her home and warn her that CUPE wanted her to just shut up.

Faoro knows about those brass knuckles tactics but he's never taken a stand, even though he has the ear of CUPE boss Barry O'Neill. Faoro attends CUPE conventions and when O'Neill --- who he is reportedly angling to replace -- and the other union brass set the agenda, the secretaries are never on it.

One of those secretaries owns a house in Vancouver. Imagine that, paying a mortgage on a non-union wage while being run into the ground with overwork. When Faoro asks her to turn over her last cappuccino, I can just hear her:

In the private sector this deadwood would have been cleared away a long time ago.

In private sector, fraud on the job is generally grounds for termination. Not at the City of Vancouver though.

When I mentioned at the opening of my post that CUPE and City management work "in synch" to inflict cruelty on the little people, I was referring in part to the fraud that goes on.

Like when Carnegie Security boss Skip Everall [CUPE] allegedly manufactured numerous witnesses -- none of which he has ever been able to name -- for the City's security database to justify the banning of a woman who had dared talk back to a man, Whitty was in lock step with him. She made a point of not interviewing the key witness to that fraud.

Another case in which Whitty was complicit in CUPE fraud was the generation of an allegedly bogus WCB claim so that a female CUPE member caught having sex with clientele could become invisible (with pay)for a few months. They had to portray her as facing a "safety" risk, so they smeared innocent people who were never given a chance to defend themselves, all so that CUPE and City management could get that gal a wad of cash. [Incidentally, she has improved since returning.] There should be an investigation into that creative WCB claim before anyone involved in it has their contracts renewed. The CUPE Local led by Paul Faoro should be criminally investigated too, as they were involved in putting together that WCB claim.

The City is so confident that the little guy paying their way is an idiot that they commit 'in your face' fraud. Like when Ethel Whitty, with the knowledge of her $200,000 a year supervisor at City Hall, went on CBC Radio and faked a reason for banning an elected official from Carnegie and even denying him access to Board meetings -- never mentioning that the reason she was giving on CBC radio wasn't the reason given in the official City letter she had delivered to him. CUPE members had also been involved in the banning of that elected official.

And then there is the unaccounted for money that a Board member asked Ethel Whitty about, only to be repeatedly stonewalled. And there is the evidence, brought forward by a Board member, that Whitty was taking money from funders and using it for purposes other than what funders had been told.

Despite this record, the City has reportedly given Whitty a million dollars to run the Homeland Festival during the Olympics. Guys from Carnegie were talking about it at Waves coffee shop the other night, shaking their heads in amazement.

Twice I have seen Everall leave the Carnegie building after work laughing; he laughs to himself as he walks. Presumably he's laughing all the way to the bank.